IJsvogel Retail

IJsvogel Retail is the company behind retail organisations Pets Place and Boerenbond.

As DevOps Architect Online, I supported a number of teams in the IJsvogel Retail organisation, the corporation behind Pets Place and Boerenbond.

I was responsible for the day-to-day operations revolving around the ecommerce platform built on Magento 2 - running on Amazon Web Services behind Varnish caching servers.

This included troubleshooting issues and reporting these to the correct suppliers, such as Payment Service Providers (Buckaroo), Magento 2 developers (50x Solutions), iOS/Android developers (Egeniq) or the Delivery Management Software provider Paazl. Together with the Online Business team I was responsible for Scrum sprint planning and project prioritization.

I also helped introduce a Customers Loyalty program (VIP Club) consisting of iOS and Android mobile apps built by Egeniq, the ecommerce website and a CRM platform built by The Valley.

As a DevOps engineer, I’ve been tasked to setup a new fully automated platform. Customers will be able to request a dedicated, Atlassian-stack based DTAP environment in a private cloud. Other tools like Jenkins and Rundeck may be added to the stack. I developed a Python tool that reads configuration from Puppet Hiera and consequently creates the necessary virtual machines in a VMware vCloud environment. It will also configure a private LAN for the customer as well as networking (SNAT) and firewalling rules. The public internet facing proxy servers, running nginx, will receive a signal to update their configuration. Aside from creating the DTAP environment, documentation and instructions for maintenance and provisioning new customers must be created. A follow-up project consists of migrating current customers to a new, private cloud.

Other software used:

• Vagrant
• PostgreSQL
• OpenDJ (LDAP server)

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I helped deploy Ansible Tower. At the time of writing Tower was being used to apply configurations to more than 150 servers every day. These configurations consist of self-written ‘roles’ aswell as the playbooks themselves. I deployed many different server setups, all using ansible playbooks, such as:

• Magento setup:
  • This setup hosts Magento-based CMS sites.
  • Nginx is optimized with Magento-specific settings.
  • It uses NFS shared storage on a NetApp cluster.
  • Backups are made amongst others with Bacula.
  • PHP is running in php-fpm mode.
  • There is a Redis instance per website for caching.
• Trytond setup:
  • This setup uses nginx with gunicorn as backends.
  • PostgreSQL is used as a databasebackend and Sphinx / searchd for the search functionalities.
  • Python Trytond is installed into a virtualenv.
  • Redis is used as a caching backend.
  • Every service is controlled with systemd templates.
• Plone CMS setup:
  • This setup is load-balanced using HAProxy on a number of Zope workers and Zope database hosts.
  • Each worker runs Varnish with a number of backends for each site. These are all periodically probed and removed from the pool if they are no longer responding.
  • The customer requested ansible playbooks on one of the worker to easily deploy and update sites.
• Docker setup:
  • This customer uses docker extensively for deploying and automatically scaling websites.
  • Containers are limited to customer-specific networks.
  • Docker networks and nginx are managed with Ansible.
• ElasticSearch / MongoDB / PostgreSQL / RabbitMQ / Redis cluster:
  • This setup contains a number of database servers and worker servers.
  • All services are running in either cluster mode or master/slave mode.
  • Workers run apps, written in go, that are exposed to the internet via nginx.

Besides engineering new setups and clusters, customers often requested a way of testing their software on their servers, without using the “live” servers. I used Packer to create Vagrant boxes that are identical to their production servers.

I also wrote a number of tools in Python:

• server_check: This open source tool checks if a DirectAdmin server is still functioning correctly.
• GitHub webhook: this webhook receives GitHub payloads, if certain criteria are met it will instruct Ansible Tower to start a new job.
• Migration scripts: collect data, write it to JSON format, and read the data to call the DirectAdmin API to create new accounts, email addresses, transfer data, etc.
• Ansible notification callback plugin (email).

Other duties include customer contact via phone and e-mail (3rd line support), configuring Cisco / NetApp infrastructure, implement firewalling and VPN using Juniper and pfSense appliances and implementing two-factor authentication for SSH.

My job at TIW was two-fold: I was a Linux Engineer but also Manager of the department. As Linux engineer, my job mainly consisted of the following:

• Managing 200+ web, mail, dns and database servers for the Shared Hosting platforms.
• Implementing Puppet, DNSSEC, IPv6.
• I created an Asterisk VoIP telephony system.
• Migrated many servers from DirectAdmin, Ensim, cPanel etc to our own Control Panel.
• Managing the network (BGP peerings and transits, IPv6 and uplinks).
• Connecting our network to the AMS-IX and NL-IX.
• Automatically creating VMWare virtual machines by implementing the C# API.
• Engineering and developing the new Shared Hosting platform.
• Developing systems administration scripts and services in Python, C# and Perl.
• Developing and maintaining the Hosting and Domain names Control Panel for customers.
• Third line support.

As Manager Engineering, I was responsible for the following:

• Implement project management using Kanban/Scrum.
• Lead the Engineering team (“Scrum” master).
• Have periodic performance meetings with team members.
• Ensure the company policies were applied and kept to.
• Ensure the departmental planning were in line with corporate strategies.
• Create and monitor budgets.
• Measure and report on results of the department.
• Describe, implement and ensure departemental processes.

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